


Guten Tag

by Margaret_Armstrong



Series: Roommates [2]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Gen, Other, cursing in multiple languages, technology works until it doesn't, the kids meet again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margaret_Armstrong/pseuds/Margaret_Armstrong
Summary: How September 23, AC 195 started out for two completely different L2 colonists.One of them is having a good day, and it's not Hilde.





	Guten Tag

**Author's Note:**

> Still don't own Gundam Wing.
> 
> While going through my saved notes for more Queen's Rook snippets, I found a Roommate drabble inspired by NASA's experimentation on growing salads in space. Apparently lettuce grows twice as big in zero-G! They used a programmed sequence of red and blue LED lights that made the grow-area look purple; the pictures were pretty impressive.  
> Mint, however, doesn't require the slightest bit of encouragement. The spearmint I left in the raised bed outside (over the 2017-2018 winter!) has laughed in the face of all Mother Nature's attempts to kill it. It has now taken over half the bed.  
> I can make so much tea...
> 
> Music for this: Joan Jett, "Bad Reputation."  
> And what the hell, why not Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" for the first bit, because you KNOW D. Maxwell appreciates the classics.

~~~~~~~~~~  
**September 23, AC 195**

He fired ALL of Deathscythe’s thrusters, drunk on freedom and the sheer elation of being rejoined with his Gundam—in space! 

70% complete or not, Deathscythe was doing just fine. 

No, not fine.

Fucking _**awesome**_!

Here at last was the mobility necessary to fight those frickin’ mobile dolls, to spin, to glide, to roar through the black like a bat out of hell.

Duo set up an insane twist in their full-tilt escape, g-forces be damned. He could take it, and Deathscythe fucking deserved to let loose after the shitty weeks since August. He whooped with pure joy, halfway believing the fires from his exhaust blew a fucking hole in the moon.

Fuck that lunar base.

Fuck that OZ lunar base!

It sounded so good in his head, he shouted it to the whole universe: “FUCK YOU, OZ! AND THE FUCKING DOLLS YOU RODE IN ON!”

Cackling madly, Duo Maxwell dipped Deathscythe out of the spinning vector he’d previously established, turning sweet and hard towards the shadowed side of the moon, one hand flipping on the hyper jammer to completely confuse any pursuit. The other hand flipped an expressive gesture towards the direction of the lunar base.

It was great to be back.

~~~

A few hours later, once he’d calmed down (just a little bit), Duo settled Deathscythe Hell (Deathscythe **Hell**. Muahaha.) in a crater facing L2’s main colony wheel. Hundreds of miniature colonies glittered around L2 Main in a silent, distant dance. Beyond those, the infinite darkness of space stretched on beyond the comprehension of man. He was lucky; the far side of the moon hadn’t swung ‘round to face the sun yet, so none of the radiation obstructed the view of his home colony. He had no clue which exact tiny light had spawned him (The late great V8 being the lead contender.), but he’d spent enough time hitchhiking from point to point that he was comfortable claiming the whole cluster as his personal territory.

_LaGrange Point 2: never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy._

He focused on system checks.

Thrusters operated just fine, but fuel was a little lower than he’d like straight out the gate (Oops). Add to that the severe depletion of ‘Scythe’s solar cell reserves, and he’d have to pussyfoot it until the moon swung ‘round to the sun, or else the moon’s graveyard could be his own before he reached a viable safehouse. At least life support seemed to be working okay; the air scrubbers hadn’t bugged out yet, plus he wasn’t feeling the absolute zero of outside with the quiet hum of Deathscythe’s engines behind him. Could be a different story with sunrise and the accompanying killer radiation, though. Would Hell be able to take the heat? There was just no telling where that missing 30% lurked, whether in the wiring or some physical aspect of Deathscythe’s plan the Ghoul Squad didn’t have time to finish. He remembered the projector schematics, so just finding the negative space should be pretty easy…

Duo dove into Deathscythe’s programming for the next few hours, looking for surprises.

~~~~~

Hilde threw the uniform coat as far away as possible, cursing creatively as plant Pod E regurgitated a complex black slurry of nutrients and vegetable matter: her welcome home surprise in the kitchen. Never, never again would she close up the house without first dismantling the hydroponics system rather than just turning it off and draining the pods to halt the growth process. Some of the pods had gone right back to standard procedure, and with no one to eat the produce, the plants went wild. Half were now working just fine under the blue and red LEDs (already some spinach was starting to sprout), but Pod E was being a real pain in the ass, and F was completely choked with over enthusiastic basil.

And mint.

Effing mint.

It was the cockroach of the plant world.

Hilde growled.

Already it had been a long 53 hours of hitching rides and dodging patrols, and coming back to a stinking, roiling jungle in the overheated pantry had been the absolute cherry. At least the basil invasion meant that she hadn’t gone hungry upon arriving (still no food in the fridge; she’d cleared it out when she enlisted), and late September was the colony’s “temperate” season, so the weather outside was gorgeous.

As if she’d go outside.

She’d doubled and tripled back enough in her cross-colony jaunt that hopefully any remaining OZ interest in her as a possible spy had waned. Luckily, her short hair and tiny body were tailor made for skipping around in secret. Smudge the face and tape the breasts, and she made a very believable 12-year-old boy. Most of the trouble came when convincing people she was actually fifteen, but most ships hadn’t noticed the stowaway, or else they were Sweeper ships where she could bargain her passage… Right back to the old homestead.

With the insane hydroponics Pod E.

Obviously Howard hadn’t had a use for this place while she was gone, because no self-respecting mechanic would let this kind of organic insanity continue. No one had touched the old house and scrapyard since she shut it up at the end of July.

She shoved her hair out of her face and rolled up her undershirt sleeves. Thus prepared for battle, she turned up the colony radio.

With the advent of OZ’s peaceful overtures (Ha.), some of the classic banned music was actually seeing radio play, especially since most of it was out of copyright—ah, sugary chick pop. Not the Led Zeppelin she’d been hoping for.

She flipped the switch to the House mix, the Frankenstein-esque music collection of three people, and turned up the Joan Jett until the speakers nearly made the room vibrate. “Bad Reputation” was absolutely perfect for this job.

Loud. Angry. Brash.

She grabbed a hunk of mint with her heavy gloves and yanked.

After she dealt with this, she needed to unearth the phone to try calling Howard again with a rescinding of the house-use offer since she was back in residence. Or maybe she would actually do what she’d implied to Howard she would do and use part of her inheritance to go to school, though she could already quote The Mechanic’s Guide to Metallurgy and Physics backwards and forwards and the only subjects left to study in her age range were the humanities and history, which was depressing as all hell.

Maybe if she tried hard enough, she could find the exact point in the past 200 years when the colonies got so twisted.

Could be fun.

If guilt-ridden masochism could ever be considered fun.

She threw an aromatic bush of mint across the room, falling to her knees in the sludge and crushing more leaves under her gloves.

It did not feel good to be a murderer.

Selfish Moron First-Class Hilde Schbeiker didn’t deserve to be here, safe and sound. Back home.

Why didn’t she just let that guy go the first time?

Because she’d drunk the OZ Kool-aid, that’s why,

She was eager, she was young, and she was stupid. She’d been burning up with the idea of righteous revenge against the Alliance. She’d been too proud to allow an opportunity to prove herself in combat pass her by. She’d been caught up in the thrill of actually doing something.

Now the Lunar Base was destroyed and all rebel prisoners executed. 

The kid was dead.

So what if he wasn’t an innocent? So what if he’d been a Gundam pilot?

That made him one guy on one side of a war.

Not a bastard.

Not a monster.

Just a person.

Speaking of sides, if it came down to picking between the guy who’d take a bullet for an enemy when he already had the advantage versus people who had no problem _shooting their own soldiers_ to achieve victory, Hilde knew damn well which side she’d prefer to be on.

She was NOT sorry.

But she’d failed there, too. Covering for him the second time hadn’t helped his cause; she’d just enabled him to drop into his own grave.

The OZ machine: just like the Alliance machine, only more efficient and insidious.

It was pretty amazing; before meeting that Maxwell guy and having the wool pulled from her eyes, Hilde Schbeiker would have been the absolute last soldier expected to enter the brig (except as an escorting officer). After Maxwell… Completely different story. 

Add the BS with her former unit, and OZ as an entity was REALLY unhappy with her unapologetically insubordinate ass.

The Colonel got involved.

Hilde shuddered at the memory, getting to her feet without bothering to wipe the grime from her knees. 

She welcomed the stains.

White pants were so idiotic for a pilot’s uniform; whatever happened to using blue or black so you could get the pants dirty if there was an emergency while you were in formal dress? She should have deserted as soon as she saw the stupid prissy pants. 

At least now the cloth was smeared with green, brown, and a strangely biological blackish crud created by herbs overflowing from their grow pods until the water-nutrient bath ALSO overflowed and created an inch-deep slurry in the watertight pantry.

The first thing Hilde was going to do after getting the house up and running again was to roll these damn pants in grease until they were a totally different color. Maybe she’d burn them.

That could be cathartic.

She shucked off a glove to free her hand and put Jett on repeat. She needed the noise. The lyrics were intimately apropos.

And frankly, Pod E deserved some percussive engineering since it seemed hell-bent on enacting its own mint-flavored impression of demonic possession. Little flying droplets of wet matter kept spraying out of it in concentric circles now that she’d removed the cosmetic cover.

“Du mieses Stück Scheiße!” 

Hilde hit the offending pod with the wrench in an attempt to stopper the spluttering mass. Noxious greenish-black slorps of decayed mint vines exploded outwards like a botanical fountain and pelted her... All over.

Well, the stupid pants weren’t white any more. Yay.

The ‘ponic tub glorbed at her. 

Smug bastard.

“…Ich hasse dich.” 

Suddenly, the music stopped.

Through the well of non-sound silence ringing in her ears, Hilde still heard the unmistakable clacking mechanism of a gun behind her head. Which meant it was very close.

“Hey Ozzie,” said a male voice. “Put the wrench down, would ya?”

_What a **hell** of a day._

~~~~~


End file.
